I got my new phone yesterday, and now I'm reset free (so far), the GPS is improved, and i'm back to standard battery performance.
The update process ran three times on the device, and when I did it on the previous device, it only went through one round of updating. Not sure if this is because of whatever firmware the new device came with, or if that was the intention originally, but things seem good to go now running on both 4G or wifi.